Dali House

I’ve done some damage to my right shoulder and, pending a visit to a doctor, envision myself in some sort of cast and unable to type with my right hand. Could I manage with my left? Then I found this line in the basic, one-size-fits-all, self-replicating online biography of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919): “In 1880 Renoir broke his right arm and for some time painted with his left hand.”

For me it raises two questions: How did he break his arm, and what did his southpaw paintings look like?

It didn’t take long to assemble a bunch of images of Renoir’s 1880 paintings, even with one website that’s still under construction being quite off-handed (pardon the pun) about jumbling the dates of his works. Then I discovered that the self-replicating biography itself had the wrong year for his skeleton-rearranging accident — it was in 1897.

There was a lesson to be learned here, but I like to make the same mistakes twice, just to be sure I wasn’t right the first time.

It didn’t take long to assemble a bunch of images of Renoir’s 1897 paintings, and put the ones from 1880 back in the museums when no one was looking. The broken-arm paintings, displayed throughout this post (shown here is “Young Woman in Profile”), are fine, nothing bizarro or skewed about them that I can see, nothing you can spot and say, “Oh, that’s so gauche!” (get it?). But more on that later.

How did he break his arm? I kept searching and found the “official” reason: He fell off his bicycle.

He was 56 at the time. I know Europeans love their bikes, but this is a famous, well-to-do artist. What was he doing on a bike? I’m thinking someone made up this bicycle accident. I’m thinking his wife broke his arm.

Renoir met Aline Charigot, a 20-year-old dressmaker (he was 43), in 1880 and they had two sons (Pierre the future actor in 1885 and Jean the future film director in 1894) before they finally got married in 1890. Why the delayed wedding? No one explains. No Cézanne intrigues, having to hide the girlfriend lest he get cut out of dad’s will. That’s his painting of Aline and her dog, Bob, from the year they met.

There’s gossip: Aline wanted to live in Burgundy, Renoir didn’t. Aline wanted children, Renoir didn’t. Aline told him to get lost then, and he did for a while, travelling around Europe meeting other painters and visiting Algeria too. He was back in 1862, though, and willing to negotiate.

They shacked up on Rue St Georges in Paris, Renoir getting so classical and figurative with his art that his fellow impressionists freaked out. Click on “Luncheon of the Boating Party” and a separate page will pop up with a story about it.

Renoir had transcended impressionism and wanted form, and what a load of form in “The Bathers” (click to see a larger image). The effects of light were one thing; sensuous babes were entirely another. Call it feminine grace, admire the pearly skin. They’re still naked and hot.

American collectors thought it was great, of course, and he had a very successful exhibition in 1883. Cash rolled in. The Renoirs moved to a bigger place, the Château des Brouillards in Montmartre, and hired a housekeeper, Aline’s 15-year-old cousin Gabrielle Renard, whose duties included modelling for the man of the house. That’s Gabrielle playing with little Jean in an 1897 canvas.

For Renoir, always, there were the “other” women. The man liked his pretty girls, especially those who would get their kit off and pose for him. So the temptation to blame Aline for the cracked limb seemed irresistible. He met her and they eventually had kids, but they didn’t marry for 10 years. The woman took some convincing.

“Why shouldn’t art be pretty?” he’d say, rowing her around on a pond. “There are enough unpleasant things in the world.” Aline’s coming to a boil. Renoir chuckles to a pal, “I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it.”

And then, once they did marry, he just kept right on painting nudes. I’m thinking that one day Aline just had enough and hauled off and cracked his easel over his shoulder.

What happened next makes for some fascinating art history, so it’s time to stop kidding the Renoirs and admit that it was indeed a cycling accident that damaged Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and permanently.

They were spending another summer in Essoyes, toward the north of France, the village Aline and Gabrielle came from. They’d just bought a house there and one day Renoir fancied a bicycle trip with his painter-caricaturist pal Abel Faivre. He supposedly wanted to go see the Château de Servigny, an old castle with a turret still standing from the Hundred Years War.

Shown here in a Google Earth image, the “castle” would host the Germans’ surrender of Cherbourg in another four decades. It’s 470 kilometres from Essoyes, quite a jaunt on a bicycle if you’re not actually competing in the Tour de France.

And it was raining, but off they went. Renoir took a bad skid and fell heavily to the ground, snapping the arm. His doctor immobilised it in plaster for 40 days, but then afterward Renoir still had an aching shoulder. It felt like the touch of rheumatism he’d had in 1894 when he was living in Paris, but this time it was bad. The tumble from the bicycle in 1897 had shaken loose an evil genie.

This image on a postage stamp, supposedly showing Renoir holding his palette in his right hand and painting with the left, is from Ann Mette Heindorff’s terrific website on art history as recorded in philately.

The site repeats the error of the arm being broken in 1880, but points out with a tut-tut that the painting “Diana” issued on the same stamp sheetlet dates from 1867.

When in December 1898 the pain raged so severely that Renoir couldn’t pick up a brush for days at a time, separate doctors prescribed separate medicines, but they didn’t help, nor trips to the healing baths in Aix, Bourbonne and Saint-Laurent-les-Bains, nor exercise or playing with a cup and ball. He moved south to the warmer latitudes, to Grasse, the City of Perfume, in 1900, then Le Cannet in1902, then Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1903.

In 1907 Renoir bought a farm at Cagnes called Les Collettes and had the garden expanded into a lovely, landscaped park. By the following year he needed a pair of walking sticks. In 1912 his legs and arms became paralysed and he was confined to a wheelchair. He also suffered from cataracts, which affected his vision, so that his later paintings tended to reddish tones with softer lines.

This is “Girl with a Guitar” from 1897.
Some of the better online biographies form a vivid image of Gabrielle having to force Renoir’s paintbrushes between his twisted fingers so he could continue working, but at least one insists this wasn’t so. The University of Montpelier has a wonderful medical assessment of the situation, though, indicating that his fingers were encircled by bands to guard against the hardness of the brushes.

Jean Renoir recalled that listening to Offenbach brought his father some relief, but nevertheless his strokes became rapid jabs at the canvas, the brush gripped fast. Gnarled limbs are better at moulding forms rather than conducting lines of paint, so in 1913 Renoir was happily introduced by Ambroise Vollard to Richard Guino, and together they made sculptures. The photo shows Renoir and Aline with youngest son Claude.

Aline died in June 1915. Her husband paid tribute by painting “Bunch of Roses” and sculpting the bust of her that sits atop her tombstone. There’s a nice biography of Aline here.

In November 1919 Renoir came down with pneumonia and it triggered a heart attack. He died in his sleep on December 3. His legacy: 4,000 paintings, more than Manet, Cézanne and Degas combined.

The Montpelier website isn’t alone in marvelling at Renoir’s bravery in the face of his debilitation. “It could be that Renoir is the only great painter who never painted a sad painting,” it notes. “One finds, in Renoir, the same force [as Raoul Dufy, also crippled by rheumatism] to overcome the constraints of the disease.”

The worse the pain, in fact, the bigger the projects Renoir conceived. “The Bathers” of 1914 was a huge canvas, and he yearned to decorate the staircase of their home.

The site points out, too, that Renoir fought his affliction by remaining socially active and psychologically upbeat. He continued to travel, to Essoyes each summer, and further afield, and just four months before his death visited his son Jean in Paris. He wasn’t easily pinned down. Perhaps the lust for life that I kid him about was too great.

While tracking Renoir’s movements in search of the scene of the Great Bicycle Accident, I spent a while in sunny Cagnes-sur-Mer. I was working on my tan waiting for the local bicycle repairman to show up and give his side of the story when the mayor of Cagnes mentioned that Renoir had not only lived there, he’d died there and was buried outside one of the many local churches.

“Pinning the Hat”, an 1897 lithograph, showes Berthe Morisot’s daughter Julie helping her cousin Paulette.
I checked Google Earth for ratification and found that no one had bothered sticking a thumbtack on the spot to say so. (The French are only interested in where you can catch the train.) So I sorted out where the Renoir abode was and then, to find his grave, I went to Find-a-Grave.com. It said the mayor was a lying Frenchman and that Renoir, his missus and two of his three sons are buried in Essoyes, way the hell up north.

Again, Google Earth Francais knew nothing of this. Am I going to have to pinpoint the homes, studios and graves of every French artist all by myself?!

Calming down, I fed the Babelfish a bunch of foreign words from a website that seemed to be nattering at length about Essoyes and a bicycle. Sure enough, that’s where the accident took place.

This is not to say that Cagnes doesn’t have a lot going for it, Renoir-wise. His house, the Villa des Collettes, is now the Musée Renoir, plush in a lush garden of ancient olive trees and great views, the studio intact with palettes and brushes and “only” 10 paintings. I’m not sure if “Landscape near Cagnes” from 1902 is one of them.

Henri Matisse came here in December 1917, popping over from his own place in neighbouring Nice, the Beau Rivage. Renoir showed him how to squint just right into the Midi sunlight and Matisse, setting up his easel, painted “Olive Trees, Renoir’s Garden in Cagnes” and three other canvases.

“Never have I seen so happy a man,” Matisse said, “and I have promised myself that, in my turn, I will not be cowardly.”

Claude Renoir, nicknamed Coco, sold the Collettes estate to the town of Cagnes after living there himself for many years, but not before his brother Jean shot part of one of his last movies there, 1959’s “Lunch on the Grass”. The museum opened in 1960.

But there is no Renoir grave in Cagnes, and don’t believe any websites that tell you the grave “is located in the small French town of Limoges”. That’s where Renoir was born, the son of a tailor, put to work in a factory by his dad, painting porcelain until he was replaced by a machine.

To see a headstone you have to go to Essoyes, where the Renoirs had a house as early as 1895 and the artist later bought the adjoining property as well and built a studio.

In the cemetery just down the road are the graves of Renoir, Aline and their sons Pierre, Jean and Claude, plus that of Jean’s second wife, Dido Freire.

Renoir and his wife are not together. She’s just behind him, with her mother and the boys and a grandson.

Pierre-Auguste and Aline have bronze busts atop their headstones, his the creation of his assistant Richard Guino. Aline’s was stolen in 2005 but recovered and replaced.

I can’t leave the subject of artists, broken limbs and bicycles without mentioning two other items.

MF Hussain is regarded as a national treasure in India, though a great many Indians want any such glory revoked now that he’s gone and depicted several Hindu gods in the nude. One of the country’s greatest artists is currently in self-imposed exile in Dubai as controversy rages in his homeland.

From a recent interview with Hussain:

We were all very concerned when you damaged your right hand in London.

Yes, for two months my right hand was in a plaster. So I thought, “What to do!” Then I started with my left hand. That is when I experienced with the structure of the colour. After painting for 60 or 70 years, now you don’t struggle for the technical part, but the vision.

Some connection with painting nudes and losing your mobility?

And finally, there’s Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 bought a snow shovel in a Manhattan hardware store and called it a work of art, specifically “In Advance of the Broken Arm”. It was one of his readymades and of course wasn’t meant to last, once its derisive purpose was served. It dutifully vanished in time, but when Duchamp was lionised in the 1960s for being ahead of his time, he authorised a copy, in fact many of them. Snow shovels and urinals are in museums everywhere, so think twice before you have a pee or offer to clear the sidewalk.

This is Duchamp on his bicycle. He wasn’t crazy about it like Alfred Jarry, though. The absurdist creator of Ubu Roi slept with his bike at the foot of his bed.

Oh, what the hell — let’s give Renoir the last word:

“I’ve been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colours is black.”